Author: thewhatadmin

Henry Whittier-Ferguson is a guy who lives and makes things in Portland, OR. His writing has also appeared at:
http://www.jamfeed.com/news/author/henry-whittier-ferguson/
He raps and makes beats, which can be found at:
https://soundcloud.com/hbzbeats

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It’s one of those pulpy paper flyers stapled to a telephone pole, and it’s too deliciously cryptic for Abbey not to rip down and keep. Why not be totally changed into fire? There’s a picture of a robed and hooded figure raising his hands to heaven, his fingertips bursting into little spits of flame. Below the text is a phone number.

When thinking about trilogies of music released in under a year’s time, I’m fondly reminded of the months I spent listening to The Weeknd in 2010, or Young Thug in 2015. That Abel played up his mystery by secreting out of Youtube’s ether and withholding a face for the drug-addled lothario until releasing his trilogy entire bolstered the listener’s excitement that they were truly discovering something new. The mythic aspect of Young Thug’s Slime Season mixtapes did much the same: recording hundreds of songs in a matter of weeks in some deluge of inspiration which were then doled out over a more human timescale of months. Thug seemed surprised to discover that artists needed more than a few minutes to record a song; true, we only need that many to listen, a few more to digest. The Weeknd created a mood and a spectre; Thug seems reliably bent on reinvention album to album. Both have gone on to great fame, arguably thanks to their ambition and staying in the listener’s ear for most of a calendar year.

You don’t take acid. You run into your friends smoking in the little fence area outside the Roseland and one of them offers you some, but then it turns out your other friend ate it all. That’s probably for the best. You’re flying across the country on the red eye right after the show to spend Thanksgiving with your family. Somebody on the street walks by smoking a joint and the guy working the door starts shouting at all the cigarette smokers to “put it out!” so you all put your hands up and head inside. There are boxes of 3D glasses stacked by the guy taking tickets by the stairs, and he’s handing a pair to everybody who goes up.

Andrew Saltzman isn’t slouching in his throne. In January, he released an instrumental album, Tape Lonely Boy, under his production alias, Blacktop Megaphone, and he hasn’t stopped there. February saw him spearheading a benefit project for Planned Parenthood–a series of singles put out by Throne Age, the label he co-founded with his brother (stage name: dug., who also released an instrumental tape in January). They aren’t slowing down, either. I caught up with Saltzman to talk tapes, beats, and the artist’s relationship with loneliness, and to get a taste of what Throne Age has in store for the rest of the year.

Exactly one year ago, we launched The What, reviving our Lewis & Clark College KLC Radio show, in website form. Our goal at the start was simply to create an outlet for us to write and for you to read about music, pop culture, art, and whatever else we happen find compelling. There are, of course, countless websites doing essentially the same thing, all of us filling up the digital ethers with opinions, commentaries and counter-commentaries, words upon words upon words.

I slept on J. Cole for a long time. I wasn’t bumping 2014 Forest Hills Drive when it came out and it took about six months of critical acclaim for me to realize that his music was undeniable. He’s not a complicated rapper, but his writing style is a demonstration of the value of being clear and direct. You know exactly what Cole is talking about when he raps. You don’t have to print out the lyrics and bust out a red sharpie, a dictionary and an encyclopedia (or more realistically, just check Rap Genius) to figure out what he’s trying to tell you. Cole makes it easy for his audience to understand his flaws and insecurities in the stories he tells.

What does it take to turn culture to myth? How do we in 2016 enshrine a way of living, speaking, being? This year, The Get Down, on Netflix, and Atlanta, on FX, took on the ancient project of mythologizing, both looking at hip-hop episodically, through the lens of a television camera. But though the center of their focus is the same, their approaches are remarkable in their nearly diametric opposition to one another.